Fountain beverage dispensing equipment is well known in the art and includes various types of machines for dispensing liquid drinks and for making and dispensing slush ice drinks as well. Typically, drinks are dispensed from one or more dedicated valves, each structured to dispense only a single flavor. In order to save space and cost, it is known to have multiple flavor valves that have the capacity to dispense a plurality of flavors from the same nozzle, but such valves dispense only one flavor at a time.
Various carbonated drinks, particularly cola drinks, have long been available, especially in bottled form with various flavorings such as cherry, vanilla and lemon added to the basic syrup formulation of the drinks. While additive flavors can be included in the syrup formulations as supplied to the drink retailer, such an approach increases the number of dedicated valves that are required. Thus, for example, in addition to a basic cola flavor and its diet counterpart, there would need to be separate valves for cherry and vanilla versions of each, and so on. This number can be increased further if caffeinated and non-caffeinated versions of the beverages are desired. The problem becomes particularly acute for slush ice or so-called frozen carbonated beverage “FCB” dispensing equipment, which typically can only serve two or four flavors per machine and where the cost per flavor is considerably higher than with liquid beverage dispensing equipment.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a mechanism for optionally adding a flavor or flavors to a base drink in such manner that the number of valves, and hence the complexity and cost of the beverage dispensing equipment, can be reduced.